Homicide, North and South
Homicide, North and South

Author: Horace V. Redfield

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780814208519

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While H. V. Redfield was not the first person to note the elevated amount of interpersonal violence in Southern and border states, Homicide, North and South was the first book to investigate regional differences in murder systematically, by discussing counts and rates from different states and the two major regions side by side. It appears to be the first book to draw on newspaper clippings to document homicide rates quantitatively, and it certainly was the first work to do so in a systematic, comparative fashion. Redfield was the first person to use multiple data sources, both news clippings and (from those states that collected and published them) mortality or criminal statistics. Where possible, he compared such records with one another to establish their joint reliability.

Darker than Night
Darker than Night

Author: Tom Henderson

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2006-10-03

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1429997087

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In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies embark on a hunting trip from suburban Detroit to rural Michigan, unaware they would soon become the hunted. Darker than Night tells the chilling true story of the mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects–the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness's account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.

Goat Castle
Goat Castle

Author: Karen L. Cox

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-08-09

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1469635046

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In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"—enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate "Goat Castle." Pearls was killed by an Arkansas policeman in an unrelated incident before he could face trial. However, as was all too typical in the Jim Crow South, the white community demanded "justice," and an innocent black woman named Emily Burns was ultimately sent to prison for the murder of Merrill. Dana and Dockery not only avoided punishment but also lived to profit from the notoriety of the murder by opening their derelict home to tourists. Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the story of this local feud, killing, investigation, and trial, showing how a true crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all too familiar story of racial injustice.

American Homicide
American Homicide

Author: Randolph Roth

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 0674054547

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In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

Homicide
Homicide

Author: M. Dwayne Smith

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780761907657

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A set of chapters prepared by leading figures currently engaged in the study of homicide. Each chapter provides a review and summary of research literatures that deal with social theories of homicide, methodological problems in the study of homicide research among specific groups, and public policy reactions designed to prevent homicide.

The Record of Murders and Outrages
The Record of Murders and Outrages

Author: William A. Blair

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-09-13

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1469663465

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After the Civil War's end, reports surged of violence by Southern whites against Union troops and Black men, women, and children. While some in Washington, D.C., sought to downplay the growing evidence of atrocities, in September 1866, Freedmen's Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard requested that assistant commissioners in the readmitted states compile reports of "murders and outrages" to catalog the extent of violence, to prove that the reports of a peaceful South were wrong, and to argue in Congress for the necessity of martial law. What ensued was one of the most fascinating and least understood fights of the Reconstruction era—a political and analytical fight over information and its validity, with implications that dealt in life and death. Here William A. Blair takes the full measure of the bureau's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction, which are surprisingly resonant with the present day: How do you prove something happened in a highly partisan atmosphere where the credibility of information is constantly challenged? And what form should that information take to be considered as fact?

The Body in the Reservoir
The Body in the Reservoir

Author: Michael Ayers Trotti

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0807899038

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Centered on a series of dramatic murders in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Richmond, Virginia, The Body in the Reservoir uses these gripping stories of crime to explore the evolution of sensationalism in southern culture. In Richmond, as across the nation, the embrace of modernity was accompanied by the prodigious growth of mass culture and its accelerating interest in lurid stories of crime and bloodshed. But while others have emphasized the importance of the penny press and yellow journalism on the shifting nature of the media and cultural responses to violence, Michael Trotti reveals a more gradual and nuanced story of change. In addition, Richmond's racial makeup (one-third to one-half of the population was African American) allows Trotti to challenge assumptions about how black and white media reported the sensational; the surprising discrepancies offer insight into just how differently these two communities experienced American justice. An engaging look at the connections between culture and violence, this book gets to the heart--or perhaps the shadowy underbelly--of the sensational as the South became modern.

Anatomy of Injustice
Anatomy of Injustice

Author: Raymond Bonner

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307948544

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From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

Ghettoside
Ghettoside

Author: Jill Leovy

Publisher: One World/Ballantine

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0385529988

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"Discusses the hundreds of murders that occur in Los Angeles each year, and focuses on the story of the dedicated group of detectives who pursued justice at any cost in the killing of Bryant Tennelle"--Publisher's description.

Ghost of the Ozarks
Ghost of the Ozarks

Author: Brooks Blevins

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0252094115

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In 1929, in a remote county of the Arkansas Ozarks, the gruesome murder of harmonica-playing drifter Connie Franklin and the brutal rape of his teenaged fiancée captured the attention of a nation on the cusp of the Great Depression. National press from coast to coast ran stories of the sensational exploits of night-riding moonshiners, powerful "Barons of the Hills," and a world of feudal oppression in the isolation of the rugged Ozarks. The ensuing arrest of five local men for both crimes and the confusion and superstition surrounding the trial and conviction gave Stone County a dubious and short-lived notoriety. Closely examining how the story and its regional setting were interpreted by the media, Brooks Blevins recounts the gripping events of the murder investigation and trial, where a man claiming to be the murder victim--the "Ghost" of the Ozarks--appeared to testify. Local conditions in Stone County, which had no electricity and only one long-distance telephone line, frustrated the dozen or more reporters who found their way to the rural Ozarks, and the developments following the arrests often prompted reporters' caricatures of the region: accusations of imposture and insanity, revelations of hidden pasts and assumed names, and threats of widespread violence. Locating the past squarely within the major currents of American history, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South paints a convincing backdrop to a story that, more than 80 years later, remains riddled with mystery.